Cornserve: Efficiently Serving Any-to-Any Multimodal Models

We present Cornserve, an efficient online serving system for an emerging class of multimodal models called Any-to-Any models. Any-to-Any models accept combinations of text and multimodal data (e.g., image, video, audio) as input and also generate combinations of text and multimodal data as output, introducing request type, computation path, and computation scaling heterogeneity in model serving. Cornserve allows model developers to describe the computation graph of generic Any-to-Any models, which consists of heterogeneous components such as multimodal encoders, autoregressive models like Large Language Models (LLMs), and multimodal generators like Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). Given this, Cornserve's planner automatically finds an optimized deployment plan for the model, including whether and how to disaggregate the model into smaller components based on model and workload characteristics. Cornserve's distributed runtime then executes the model per the plan, efficiently handling Any-to-Any model heterogeneity during online serving. Evaluations show that Cornserve can efficiently serve diverse Any-to-Any models and workloads, delivering up to 3.81$\times$ throughput improvement and up to 5.79$\times$ tail latency reduction over existing solutions.

Dora: QoE-Aware Hybrid Parallelism for Distributed Edge AI

With the proliferation of edge AI applications, satisfying user quality of experience (QoE) requirements, such as model inference latency, has become a first class objective, as these models operate in resource constrained settings and directly interact with users. Yet, modern AI models routinely exceed the resource capacity of individual devices, necessitating distributed execution across heterogeneous devices over variable and contention prone networks. Existing planners for hybrid (e.g., data and pipeline) parallelism largely optimize for throughput or device utilization, overlooking QoE, leading to severe resource inefficiency (e.g., unnecessary energy drain) or QoE violations under runtime dynamics. We present Dora, a framework for QoE aware hybrid parallelism in distributed edge AI training and inference. Dora jointly optimizes heterogeneous computation, contention prone networks, and multi dimensional QoE objectives via three key mechanisms: (i) a heterogeneity aware model partitioner that determines and assigns model partitions across devices, forming a compact set of QoE compliant plans; (ii) a contention aware network scheduler that further refines these candidate plans by maximizing compute communication overlap; and (iii) a runtime adapter that adaptively composes multiple plans to maximize global efficiency while respecting overall QoEs. Across representative edge deployments, including smart homes, traffic analytics, and small edge clusters, Dora achieves 1.1--6.3 times faster execution and, alternatively, reduces energy consumption by 21--82 percent, all while maintaining QoE under runtime dynamics.

CountSteer: Steering Attention for Object Counting in Diffusion Models

Text-to-image diffusion models generate realistic and coherent images but often fail to follow numerical instructions in text, revealing a gap between language and visual representation. Interestingly, we found that these models are not entirely blind to numbers-they are implicitly aware of their own counting accuracy, as their internal signals shift in consistent ways depending on whether the output meets the specified count. This observation suggests that the model already encodes a latent notion of numerical correctness, which can be harnessed to guide generation more precisely. Building on this intuition, we introduce CountSteer, a training-free method that improves generation of specified object counts by steering the model's cross-attention hidden states during inference. In our experiments, CountSteer improved object-count accuracy by about 4% without compromising visual quality, demonstrating a simple yet effective step toward more controllable and semantically reliable text-to-image generation.

SuperGen: An Efficient Ultra-high-resolution Video Generation System with Sketching and Tiling

Diffusion models have recently achieved remarkable success in generative tasks (e.g., image and video generation), and the demand for high-quality content (e.g., 2K/4K videos) is rapidly increasing across various domains. However, generating ultra-high-resolution videos on existing standard-resolution (e.g., 720p) platforms remains challenging due to the excessive re-training requirements and prohibitively high computational and memory costs. To this end, we introduce SuperGen, an efficient tile-based framework for ultra-high-resolution video generation. SuperGen features a novel training-free algorithmic innovation with tiling to successfully support a wide range of resolutions without additional training efforts while significantly reducing both memory footprint and computational complexity. Moreover, SuperGen incorporates a tile-tailored, adaptive, region-aware caching strategy that accelerates video generation by exploiting redundancy across denoising steps and spatial regions. SuperGen also integrates cache-guided, communication-minimized tile parallelism for enhanced throughput and minimized latency. Evaluations demonstrate that SuperGen harvests the maximum performance gains while achieving high output quality across various benchmarks.

Towards Decentralized and Sustainable Foundation Model Training with the Edge

Foundation models are at the forefront of AI research, appealing for their ability to learn from vast datasets and cater to diverse tasks. Yet, their significant computational demands raise issues of environmental impact and the risk of centralized control in their development. We put forward a vision towards decentralized and sustainable foundation model training that leverages the collective compute of sparingly used connected edge AI devices. We present the rationale behind our vision, particularly in support of its sustainability benefit. We further outline a set of challenges that need to be addressed to turn this vision into reality.

A Collaborative Process Parameter Recommender System for Fleets of Networked Manufacturing Machines -- with Application to 3D Printing

Fleets of networked manufacturing machines of the same type, that are collocated or geographically distributed, are growing in popularity. An excellent example is the rise of 3D printing farms, which consist of multiple networked 3D printers operating in parallel, enabling faster production and efficient mass customization. However, optimizing process parameters across a fleet of manufacturing machines, even of the same type, remains a challenge due to machine-to-machine variability. Traditional trial-and-error approaches are inefficient, requiring extensive testing to determine optimal process parameters for an entire fleet. In this work, we introduce a machine learning-based collaborative recommender system that optimizes process parameters for each machine in a fleet by modeling the problem as a sequential matrix completion task. Our approach leverages spectral clustering and alternating least squares to iteratively refine parameter predictions, enabling real-time collaboration among the machines in a fleet while minimizing the number of experimental trials. We validate our method using a mini 3D printing farm consisting of ten 3D printers for which we optimize acceleration and speed settings to maximize print quality and productivity. Our approach achieves significantly faster convergence to optimal process parameters compared to non-collaborative matrix completion.

EXP-Bench: Can AI Conduct AI Research Experiments?

Automating AI research holds immense potential for accelerating scientific progress, yet current AI agents struggle with the complexities of rigorous, end-to-end experimentation. We introduce EXP-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to systematically evaluate AI agents on complete research experiments sourced from influential AI publications. Given a research question and incomplete starter code, EXP-Bench challenges AI agents to formulate hypotheses, design and implement experimental procedures, execute them, and analyze results. To enable the creation of such intricate and authentic tasks with high-fidelity, we design a semi-autonomous pipeline to extract and structure crucial experimental details from these research papers and their associated open-source code. With the pipeline, EXP-Bench curated 461 AI research tasks from 51 top-tier AI research papers. Evaluations of leading LLM-based agents, such as OpenHands and IterativeAgent on EXP-Bench demonstrate partial capabilities: while scores on individual experimental aspects such as design or implementation correctness occasionally reach 20-35%, the success rate for complete, executable experiments was a mere 0.5%. By identifying these bottlenecks and providing realistic step-by-step experiment procedures, EXP-Bench serves as a vital tool for future AI agents to improve their ability to conduct AI research experiments. EXP-Bench is open-sourced at https://github.com/Just-Curieous/Curie/tree/main/benchmark/exp_bench.

Tempo: Application-aware LLM Serving with Mixed SLO Requirements

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into diverse applications, ranging from interactive chatbots and cloud AIOps to intelligent agents, has introduced a wide spectrum of Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for responsiveness. These workloads include latency-sensitive requests focused on per-token latency in streaming chat, throughput-intensive requests that require rapid full responses to invoke tools, and collective requests with dynamic dependencies arising from self-reflection or agent-based reasoning. This workload diversity, amplified by unpredictable request information such as response lengths and runtime dependencies, makes existing schedulers inadequate even within their design envelopes. In this paper, we define service gain as the useful service delivered by completing requests. We observe that as SLO directly reflects the actual performance needs of requests, completing a request much faster than its SLO (e.g., deadline) yields limited additional service gain. Based on this insight, we introduce Tempo, the first systematic SLO-aware scheduler designed to maximize service gain across diverse LLM workloads. Tempo allocates just enough serving bandwidth to meet each SLO, maximizing residual capacity for others best-effort workloads. Instead of assuming request information or none at all, it adopts a hybrid scheduling strategy: using quantile-based response upper bounds and dependency-graph matching for conservative initial estimates, prioritizing requests by service gain density, and refining decisions online as generation progresses. Our evaluation across diverse workloads, including chat, reasoning, and agentic pipelines, shows that Tempo improves end-to-end service gain by up to 8.3$\times$ and achieves up to 10.3$\times$ SLO goodput compared to state-of-the-art designs

Prada: Black-Box LLM Adaptation with Private Data on Resource-Constrained Devices

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in various natural language processing tasks. However, adapting these models to specialized domains using private datasets stored on resource-constrained edge devices, such as smartphones and personal computers, remains challenging due to significant privacy concerns and limited computational resources. Existing model adaptation methods either compromise data privacy by requiring data transmission or jeopardize model privacy by exposing proprietary LLM parameters. To address these challenges, we propose Prada, a novel privacy-preserving and efficient black-box LLM adaptation system using private on-device datasets. Prada employs a lightweight proxy model fine-tuned with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) locally on user devices. During inference, Prada leverages the logits offset, i.e., difference in outputs between the base and adapted proxy models, to iteratively refine outputs from a remote black-box LLM. This offset-based adaptation approach preserves both data privacy and model privacy, as there is no need to share sensitive data or proprietary model parameters. Furthermore, we incorporate speculative decoding to further speed up the inference process of Prada, making the system practically deployable on bandwidth-constrained edge devices, enabling a more practical deployment of Prada. Extensive experiments on various downstream tasks demonstrate that Prada achieves performance comparable to centralized fine-tuning methods while significantly reducing computational overhead by up to 60% and communication costs by up to 80%.

Personalized Federated Fine-tuning for Heterogeneous Data: An Automatic Rank Learning Approach via Two-Level LoRA

We study the task of personalized federated fine-tuning with heterogeneous data in the context of language models, where clients collaboratively fine-tune a language model (e.g., BERT, GPT) without sharing their local data, achieving personalization simultaneously. While recent efforts have applied parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques like low-rank adaptation (LoRA) in federated settings, they typically use single or multiple independent low-rank adapters with predefined maximal and minimal ranks, which may not be optimal for diverse data sources over clients. To address this issue, we propose PF2LoRA, a new personalized federated fine-tuning algorithm built on a novel \emph{automatic rank learning approach via two-level LoRA}. Given the pretrained language model whose weight is frozen, our algorithm aims to learn two levels of adaptation simultaneously: the first level aims to learn a common adapter for all clients, while the second level fosters individual client personalization. A key advantage of PF2LoRA is its ability to adaptively determine a suitable rank based on an individual client's data, rather than relying on a predefined rank that is agnostic to data heterogeneity. We present a synthetic example that highlights how PF2LoRA automatically learns the ground-truth rank for each client, tailoring the adaptation to match the properties of their individual data. Notably, this approach introduces minimal additional memory overhead, as the second-level adaptation comprises a small number of parameters compared to the first level. Our experiments on natural language understanding and generation tasks demonstrate that PF2LoRA significantly outperforms existing federated fine-tuning methods.